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Y'all. Opera didn't invent tabbed browsing. That was Netcaptor in 1997. Opera had an MDI, but they didn't get real tabbed browsing until three or four years later (either version 4.0 or 6.0, depending on how lenient you are about the definition of a "tab").

Firefox is/was more popular than Opera on desktop because it's effectively the direct descendent of Netscape. How fast it was, how secure it was, it's open source nature, how it was one of the only browsers that had extensions, and how it actually worked on most websites also helped things. A lot of websites either blocked Opera or fed it sites with reduced functionality. Back when Gmail first came out, Opera didn't even support some Javascript functions it needed. Well, and Opera's UI was also sort of a mess until about version 8. Firefox just had superior usability at the time.

Edit: Actually, something called InternetWorks might have been even earlier with the tabs, in 1994.

Yeah, it looks similar to mine (except I turned transparency off because it bugged me):

There is a little half-height bar across the bottom with the toggles for Link/Unite/Turbo and the view/zoom options but that's it.

I tend to stick with Opera because everything else just feels annoyingly sluggish by comparison. Firefox particularly seems to take forever to load. Chrome is almost as fast, but it annoys me that there isn't a "fit to width" view option and some sites seem to break horribly in it.

Man, to me there's a point where having a lot of extensions just equates itself with being incredibly tacky, usually crappy, and always unneeded. They need to reign it in and stop flooding their audience with shit.

Man, to me there's a point where having a lot of extensions just equates itself with being incredibly tacky, usually crappy, and always unneeded. They need to reign it in and stop flooding their audience with shit.

The crazy amount of extensions and customizability make up for that. Chrome's got extensions too, but I hear it's much more annoying to write them, so I don't see it catching up that quickly.

It's confusing because you phrased it weirdly, referring to the Firefox devs as people who are flooding their audience with shit. Firefox extensions are actually developed by a bunch of different people who have nothing to do with each other. It's not like there's a group of Firefox people in a Firefox office pumping out Firefox extensions. I agree with you that to make Firefox a browser I'd be happy to use, I have to load it up with a bunch of extensions, at which point it's slow, eternally in need of updates, and buggy, but I don't think it's fair to tell the Firefox people to "reign it in and stop flooding their audience with shit." That would be like telling a library that they need to stop authors from writing so many bad books.

Man, to me there's a point where having a lot of extensions just equates itself with being incredibly tacky, usually crappy, and always unneeded. They need to reign it in and stop flooding their audience with shit.

The crazy amount of extensions and customizability make up for that. Chrome's got extensions too, but I hear it's much more annoying to write them, so I don't see it catching up that quickly.

It's confusing because you phrased it weirdly, referring to the Firefox devs as people who are flooding their audience with shit. Firefox extensions are actually developed by a bunch of different people who have nothing to do with each other. It's not like there's a group of Firefox people in a Firefox office pumping out Firefox extensions. I agree with you that to make Firefox a browser I'd be happy to use, I have to load it up with a bunch of extensions, at which point it's slow, eternally in need of updates, and buggy, but I don't think it's fair to tell the Firefox people to "reign it in and stop flooding their audience with shit." That would be like telling a library that they need to stop authors from writing so many bad books.

Yea I know, but Mozilla is the one that officially categorizes and provides the hosting space where all these extensions are made available. I know the conventional wisdom is to allow quantity over quality, but they could reign that shit in so that there aren't thousands of useless extensions being listed. Why flood their market with crappy extensions... where has it gotten Firefox?

This was more a response to just the phrasing about Firefox "The crazy amount of extensions and customizability make up for that." I don't agree. Crazy yes, quality no.

Man, to me there's a point where having a lot of extensions just equates itself with being incredibly tacky, usually crappy, and always unneeded. They need to reign it in and stop flooding their audience with shit.

The crazy amount of extensions and customizability make up for that. Chrome's got extensions too, but I hear it's much more annoying to write them, so I don't see it catching up that quickly.

It's confusing because you phrased it weirdly, referring to the Firefox devs as people who are flooding their audience with shit. Firefox extensions are actually developed by a bunch of different people who have nothing to do with each other. It's not like there's a group of Firefox people in a Firefox office pumping out Firefox extensions. I agree with you that to make Firefox a browser I'd be happy to use, I have to load it up with a bunch of extensions, at which point it's slow, eternally in need of updates, and buggy, but I don't think it's fair to tell the Firefox people to "reign it in and stop flooding their audience with shit." That would be like telling a library that they need to stop authors from writing so many bad books.

Yea I know, but Mozilla is the one that officially categorizes and provides the hosting space where all these extensions are made available. I know the conventional wisdom is to allow quantity over quality, but they could reign that shit in so that there aren't thousands of useless extensions being listed. Why flood their market with crappy extensions... where has it gotten Firefox?

This was more a response to just the phrasing about Firefox "The crazy amount of extensions and customizability make up for that." I don't agree. Crazy yes, quality no.

The Firefox add-ons site isn't an app-store. AFAIK, Mozilla doesn't do much, if any, testing on individual extensions before hosting them. This is akin to complaining that YouTube is flooding their audience with stupid videos or Kongregate is flooding the market with stupid flash games. The rating system means that extensions which are popular with users float to the top, so there's not much to be gained from filtering and rejecting lower quality extensions.

I've been using the IE9 beta test since reformatting last week and I really like it, but I've just made the switch back to firefox.

Too many small, irritating glitches in IE9 at the moment. Like on google's autocomplete it just refused to let me click on any options. On facebook, it wouldn't let me access the menu to sign out of my account. Little things like that.

Once it gets to full release stage I'm sure I'll give it another whirl. I loved having each tab accessible in the Windows 7 taskbar preview.

I've been using the IE9 beta test since reformatting last week and I really like it, but I've just made the switch back to firefox.

Too many small, irritating glitches in IE9 at the moment. Like on google's autocomplete it just refused to let me click on any options. On facebook, it wouldn't let me access the menu to sign out of my account. Little things like that.

Once it gets to full release stage I'm sure I'll give it another whirl. I loved having each tab accessible in the Windows 7 taskbar preview.

A big part of the problem is poor to down right sloppy coding in web sites telling IE9 beta the wrong way to render the site. I'm running IE9 with preview 7 as the back end and trying to checkout at Amazon crashes this thing badly. Just about everything else is fixable with compatibly mode, I just haven't gotten Amazon working yet.

...and I thought of how all those people died, and what a good death that is. That nobody can blame you for it, because everyone else died along with you, and it is the fault of none, save those who did the killing.

The Firefox add-ons site isn't an app-store. AFAIK, Mozilla doesn't do much, if any, testing on individual extensions before hosting them. This is akin to complaining that YouTube is flooding their audience with stupid videos or Kongregate is flooding the market with stupid flash games. The rating system means that extensions which are popular with users float to the top, so there's not much to be gained from filtering and rejecting lower quality extensions.

There is some small filtering of extensions that goes on at Mozilla. Mostly just security checks though, to make sure that the extensions do what they advertise to you and don't email all your passwords to some other source (unless that is what they advertise to do). And I think a check to make sure the extension actually installs.

DigDug2000 on January 2011

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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular

Opera, Firefox, and now Chrome don't support H.264 with the HTML5 <video> tag.

It's also worth noting that IE supports WebM (although you have to download and install an additional codec, it doesn't come built in), so I think Safari is now the only browser that supports h.264 exclusively.

If I understand correctly, not a lot for the end user. h.264 files will still get played through Flash, which Google is keeping around. The one thing I was able to find is that if you are using Chrome on a portable device that has h.264 hardware acceleration (and many do) you may notice worse battery life if you play a lot of h.264 videos.

Why this happened... Apple is supporting h.264 only as the video format for HTML5. Microsoft is on board. Arguably this is because Apple has several of the patents behind h.264, although it's also an established tech with the patent situation worked out. h.264 is free for end-users and non-commercial users but commercial users have to pay a proportionately very small amount for the license. Google is in the video serving business via youtube, and doesn't want video in HTML5 controlled by any organization, even one that looks fairly benign so far. Google bought a competing standard, WebM, for about $150m and is trying to push it as an open/free competitor. Advocates of open standards are excited, small video publishers who have to convert their files to yet another format are pissed.

Yeah, but awesome retro text view, man! Watching the screen draw in line by line on a 1200bps modem is an experience not to be missed ;)

Rohan on January 2011

...and I thought of how all those people died, and what a good death that is. That nobody can blame you for it, because everyone else died along with you, and it is the fault of none, save those who did the killing.

Nothing's forgotten, nothing is ever forgotten

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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular

For some reason, Chrome is totally borked at work. I don't know if it's the new router, something chrome does, some sort of weird solar flare thing or the new DNS server. But for some reason Chrome routinely gets stuck in the middle of resolving ajax.googleapis.com and just refuses to load anythiing. So, I am back with Firefox at work.

Apothe0sis on January 2011

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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular

As has been pointed out repeatedly, Google obviously wouldn't be keeping Flash in the browser if this were actually about open standards.

Open video standards.

Integrating Flash is one way to get Adobe to implement PPAPI for Chrome. It also helps end-user security by ensuring that Flash is automatically updated. You'd be surprised at how many people have old versions of Flash installed on their machine.

I'm seeing it as a standard war between Apple (+ Microsoft) and Google (+ Mozilla (+ Opera) ). Good times.

If you really think this is about open standards you are out of your goddamn mind.

Yep, but plenty of those people showed up on Google's blog to comment. Google employees, perhaps.

As has been pointed out repeatedly, Google obviously wouldn't be keeping Flash in the browser if this were actually about open standards.

I'm seeing it as a standard war between Apple (+ Microsoft) and Google (+ Mozilla). Good times.

Doesn't Flash have some absurd install base, like over 95% of consumer desktops? After Chrome drops it, browsers that support HTML5 video and use H.264 exclusively out of the box will have something like 5% install base. (Don't ask me for a source; I'm paraphrasing from some blog I read several days ago. It sounds about right, though.) It's much easier to make war on one closed standard than it is another.

Besides all that, Flash is the #1 most popular H.264 video player in the world. Are you a video hosting site that doesn't want to convert your videos to WebM? Just use Flash player, like you've probably already been using anyway. Right now, this doesn't make any difference or inconvenience many people because such a tiny percentage of sites use HTML5 video. This is clearly looking out for Google's best interests in the future. Coincidentally, Google's best interests happen to align with basically anything that make the internet less proprietary and more open. It's an aggressive move, but is it evil if it's ultimately a win?

WebM isn't as good as H.264. H.264 has hardware decoding built into millions of devices right now. It will take WebM years if ever to gain that level of penetration. Especially since lots of portable video recording devices use H.264 on top of that. The only group that really gets screwed here are Linux users.

I really hope MS makes a H.264 plug-in for Chrome just like they did Firefox.

Me either; Linux can play H.264 just fine. I've been operating under the assumption that the content producers (currently everyone with a video camera) are going to be the ones with issues if Google's evil plot to rule the world doesn't succeed, especially when H.264's free lunch period ends in five years or so.

I've been operating under the assumption that the content producers (currently everyone with a video camera) are going to be the ones with issues if Google's evil plot to rule the world doesn't succeed, especially when H.264's free lunch period ends in five years or so.

The license is permanently free for non-profit users. The license fee for for-profit users can only be raised 10% every 5 years. Source The price for h.264 support in Chrome is laughably small, but I haven't found any articles that give a clear picture of what happens to something like Youtube in 2015.

Honestly I use all of the browsers every day and IE 9 Beta is awesome. Firefox is nice sometimes for debugging HTTP traffic because of some nice add-ons released for it, but as a user, IE 9 is probably the fastest and eventually it will have GPU acceleration for HTML 5 (I think the only one that will??)

Er, and on topic for this thread, I use Chrome. It's just a bit faster whenever I do comparisons. Very bad/unpredictable handling of .pdf files, though, which is a major issue given that I work with them a lot.

Man, to me there's a point where having a lot of extensions just equates itself with being incredibly tacky, usually crappy, and always unneeded. They need to reign it in and stop flooding their audience with shit.

The crazy amount of extensions and customizability make up for that. Chrome's got extensions too, but I hear it's much more annoying to write them, so I don't see it catching up that quickly.

It's confusing because you phrased it weirdly, referring to the Firefox devs as people who are flooding their audience with shit. Firefox extensions are actually developed by a bunch of different people who have nothing to do with each other. It's not like there's a group of Firefox people in a Firefox office pumping out Firefox extensions. I agree with you that to make Firefox a browser I'd be happy to use, I have to load it up with a bunch of extensions, at which point it's slow, eternally in need of updates, and buggy, but I don't think it's fair to tell the Firefox people to "reign it in and stop flooding their audience with shit." That would be like telling a library that they need to stop authors from writing so many bad books.

Yea I know, but Mozilla is the one that officially categorizes and provides the hosting space where all these extensions are made available. I know the conventional wisdom is to allow quantity over quality, but they could reign that shit in so that there aren't thousands of useless extensions being listed. Why flood their market with crappy extensions... where has it gotten Firefox?

This was more a response to just the phrasing about Firefox "The crazy amount of extensions and customizability make up for that." I don't agree. Crazy yes, quality no.

The Firefox add-ons site isn't an app-store. AFAIK, Mozilla doesn't do much, if any, testing on individual extensions before hosting them. This is akin to complaining that YouTube is flooding their audience with stupid videos or Kongregate is flooding the market with stupid flash games. The rating system means that extensions which are popular with users float to the top, so there's not much to be gained from filtering and rejecting lower quality extensions.

From my standpoint I made a good point then. I don't visit YouTube anymore because it is flooded with stupid videos. I don't want to spend a high proportion of my time finding good content compared to actually using good content.

I believe I read Flash is on 99% of computers now. I think I read it from some site talking about web development.

Man, to me there's a point where having a lot of extensions just equates itself with being incredibly tacky, usually crappy, and always unneeded. They need to reign it in and stop flooding their audience with shit.

The crazy amount of extensions and customizability make up for that. Chrome's got extensions too, but I hear it's much more annoying to write them, so I don't see it catching up that quickly.

The point is that if you want your browser to do something, there's an extension for it. And they're generally pretty granular. If something is unneeded, just don't install it. If you end up with a lot of extensions, that's because you've added a bunch of awesome functionality that you like and want to keep.

And there's a review system as well. Does an extension have 2 stars? Don't install it.

Does anyone know if there might be an extension (I'm using Chrome right now, but open to change) that might change it so anytime a site would have a white background, it doesn't?

Sites on a white background destroy my eyes rather quickly, its part of why I love these forums. Screwing with my monitor settings can help for a little while (the text preset is even brighter and hurtier than what I normally run..) So if I can find an extension that'll change those backgrounds to something less eye searing I'd be in heaven.

Does anyone know if there might be an extension (I'm using Chrome right now, but open to change) that might change it so anytime a site would have a white background, it doesn't?

Sites on a white background destroy my eyes rather quickly, its part of why I love these forums. Screwing with my monitor settings can help for a little while (the text preset is even brighter and hurtier than what I normally run..) So if I can find an extension that'll change those backgrounds to something less eye searing I'd be in heaven.

Does anyone know if there might be an extension (I'm using Chrome right now, but open to change) that might change it so anytime a site would have a white background, it doesn't?

Sites on a white background destroy my eyes rather quickly, its part of why I love these forums. Screwing with my monitor settings can help for a little while (the text preset is even brighter and hurtier than what I normally run..) So if I can find an extension that'll change those backgrounds to something less eye searing I'd be in heaven.

It's not an extension, but I'd recommend a little app called f.lux. It basically adjusts the colour of the screen according to the time of day. By default, it's kind of bright white in the day, then warmer towards night. I just have it warm all of the time because the bright blue-ish white of everything hurts my eyes, too.

The main upside is that it applies to everything, not just a browser. And the only downside so far is how anyone who uses one of my computers invariably goes "Why's everything yellow?" (They exaggerate. It's not actually all that bad. It's very adjustable.)